Have you met Ms. Jones?

You can't help but cotton to Alice Jones--forester, backpacker, author, activist, and reader/member for six decades.

THERE IS A CERTAIN reporter for a certain newspaper in the northern highlands o California who is not likely to forget Alice Goen Jones, or her chosen profession. In 1972, while reporting on a public hearing about a proposed wilderness area in the Salmon Trinity mountains of the Trinity National Forest, the reporter noted cavalierly in print that Jones, while testifying in support of wilderness designation, "termed herself a 'forester....'"

Justice was swift. Within days her friends had written and called the newspaper the now 82-year-old Jones recalls, "to let them know in no uncertain terms that I was justified in referring to myself as a forester." With degrees in botany and forestry and a stint with the U.S. Forest Service, Jones has fought for respect for 60 years. No doubt that certain reporter has not forgotten.

But then, no one finds it easy to forget Alice Jones. To hikers of the rugged mountains near her Weaverville, California, home, she was a leader in the fight to have the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area designated in the early 1980s. To historians, she is a two-time past president of the Trinity County Historical Society and editor of a 300-page book on Trinity County historical sites. To wildflower buffs, she's the author and photographer of a guidebook to flowers and trees of the Trinity Alps with more than 300 color photographs. And to historians of forestry, Jones is a part of a groundbreaking era, one of the first women employed by the U.S. Forest Service.

But to American Forests' editors, there was something else about the inimitable Californian that caught their eye. With Jones' renewal form to the magazine las year was a handwritten note: "This is my 60th year as a subscriber," it read. "It is now better than ever!"

Not to let such a feat as 60 years of support go unnoticed--or such praise unheralded--American Forests had several conversations with Jones about her early years in forestry and her early recollections of this magazine. More than 620 copies of American Forests have crossed Alice Jones' coffee tables over the years; not once has her subscription lapsed. In this the magazine's 100th-anniversary year, Jones' story is compelling as a measure of both how far forestry has come and how American Forests has changed to reflect the diversity of issues now associated with America's trees.

By her own reckoning, Jones was the ninth woman to earn a forestry degree in th United States, and one of the first to find full-time employment with the U.S. Forest Service. She earned her botany degree from UCLA in 1932, and was two years into her master's work in forestry at Berkeley when she was offered a job as a junior forester with the research branch of the U.S. Forest Service's Division of Silviculture in Washington, DC. She later returned to Berkeley to accept her bachelor's degree in forestry.

Her decision to enter the natural sciences "was no lark," she says. As a child growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, she spent summers on her grandparents' 100-acre dairy farm in New Hampshire, a time she calls her "first real connection with rural life." She joined the Camp Fire Girls organization and recalls an early love of summer camp as well as pride in her role as nature counselor.

When she enrolled at UCLA in 1928, Alice Jones had her eyes characteristically wide open. Back then, she says, "forest rangers were glamorized. Women weren't in forestry, although a few may have had daydreams of marrying a forester. But it was a serious interest to me, not just something that I thought would be fun."

In Washington Jones was assigned to edit and make more readable translations of scientific forestry literature from other countries. Her tenure with the U.S. Forest Service came during the Depression, she says, when the Service was participating in several "make work" programs. One of those was to use foreign workers to translate into English scientific material written in German, French and Russian. "These men didn't have a professional background in forestry or th sciences," Jones recalls, "and the translations were sometimes very awkward."

But in the Forest Service library, Jones found relief in the form of American Forests magazine. "The work was tedious," she says, "and the reading I found in American Forests had great appeal." Soon after, in 1934, Jones subscribed to th magazine she would support for six decades.

When she first began reading American Forests, Jones says, the magazine seemed to be designed "to interest the layman as well as the forester." The material wasn't as technical as that in the Journal of Forestry, for example. One of the very first articles Jones can remember reading in American Forests was, in fact fiction: the story of Paul Bunyan. "It was probably about 1935," she recalls, "and I remember it because it was my introduction to that legendary character."

In 1936, Jones left the Forest Service and returned to California, there to marry Horace Jones, whom she'd met during classes at UCLA and Berkeley. She als returned to finish work on the forestry degree that was to come to her defense decades later. The Joneses moved to the Big Bear Ranger District in the San Bernardino Mountains, where Horace Jones was assigned an assistant ranger. They lived in an isolated cabin, relying on Coleman lanterns and once-a-month shopping trips.

Life as forester and forester's wife was demanding, says Jones. Although she ha left the ranks of professional foresters, her marriage to a Forest Service district ranger meant she was still a part of the Forest Service family. The Joneses lived in 13 different homes in their first 13 years of marriage, she says, adding that such a regimen "was a good way to do your spring cleaning."

Jones never let her interest in forestry lag--or her subscription to American Forests lapse. As the wife of a forest ranger, she says she eventually began to spend more time in the backcountry than her deskbound husband. When Horace Jone was transferred to the Trinity National Forest in 1950, Alice Jones began a 45-year love affair with the rugged wilderness. She led her children on week-long back-packing trips through the high country, eventually turning to photography to record her experiences. "I got to know these Trinity Alps better than my husband did," she says. "He was stuck behind a desk, but I got out ther and hiked those mountains till I'd logged 3,000 miles--and then I got tired of keeping track."

Jones passed that love of the Trinity Mountains and nature onto her children, Dixon and Angenett--so much so that both children grew up to study sciences. He daughter, now with an M.B.A. and her own consulting business, earned her undergraduate degree in natural-resources conservation. Her son, who died an untimely death at the age of 34, was a doctor of applied science at the University of British Columbia. His love of the Trinity country is memorialized in a guidebook to the mountain trails written by a close friend and dedicated t him. Lastly, Jones has lived to see her love of forests trickle down to her grandson, who is now an industry forester.

But being a mother and grandmother didn't keep Jones out of the mountains. When the Trinity Alps area came up for wilderness designation, the wilderness movement found a finely honed voice in Alice Jones. She delivered lectures and gave slideshows. She testified in public hearings and made frequent appearances in the newspaper. In 1981 a half-million-acre wilderness area was established i the Trinity Alps of northern California.

In 60 years Alice Jones has worn many hats: forester, ranger's wife, book author, activist. Such experience has turned her into a self-avowed "middle-of-the-roader who wants to have my cake and eat it too," she says. "There is nothing more exhilarating to me than to hike through a pristine fores area. But I am also a forester who knows that our forests can be managed in suc a way as to preserve much of their beauty and still allow use of the timber."

Those ideals, she believes, are now reflected in American Forests--there's little question, she says with a laugh, that the magazine has evolved since the days of Paul Bunyan features. She says the magazine is "doing a good job with a moderate approach to what are sometimes very divisive issues, and it can do muc to give balance to these issues by continuing to use a rational approach to the coverage of controversial subjects."

Words like that from readers like Alice Jones serve as both challenge and inspiration. After 60 years of trading subscription checks for issues of "The Magazine of Trees and Forests," this great-grandmother-backpacker-forester-activist is a touchstone to the vast changes that have defined forestry in this century, and a voice that demands a listening ear.

Eddie Nickens is a photojournalist and passable fisherman from Raleigh, North Carolina.